Paint A Inch Thick
by Alan Spencer
Summary: Even after surviving the USG Ishimura, Isaac Clarke still has plenty of demons to face while drifting throught space in the relative safety of the escape shuttle.


**Paint An Inch Thick**

 _Day 1: Can't Remember The Fucking Date And The Computer Has Reset The Year, Day And Month To When It Was First Installed_

I don't know why I am writing this. Doesn't make much sense for me to waste time like this, but really, inside this tomb of hunk and steel that's drifting slowly through space, from nowhere to nowhere, I no longer have the means to do anything. I can't really been called wasting time. So I might as well write. Until this computer breaks, or I get tired of this shit. Whichever comes first. It passes the time, anyway.

I suppose I should start at the beginning. I don't know what to write about, so might as well write about me. My name is Issac Clarke. I was born on Earth, in the northeastern American seaboard sector. I wanted to be an engineer since, well, honestly, since I could remember. I don't really know why the profession drew me in so much. I guess I liked the idea of helping people, and fixing things with my own two hands. God knows I didn't do a lot of fixing for most of my life; not that I could have done much, even if I really put my mind into it, but things are like they are. I didn't do any good.

To start with, my mother's name was Octavia, and my father's name was Paul. I didn't know my father. He was a ship designer, and he left on a mission shortly after my birth, so I was left to live most of my life with only my mother. We didn't have no more relatives. Well, we did have some, but they were so distanced in one way or another. Some by mere physical distance, the majority of them by emotional distance. We were, kind of, the black sheep of the family. I don't know if they cared about it; I really don't give a shit about it, either. All I know is that I didn't at that time, because I didn't understand how the world was, and I still don't now, because it doesn't really matter. Nobody should live is life agonizing over what could have been and, besides, it was hard to miss people you didn't even know in the first place.

Anyway.

I suppose being an engineer had something to do with my absent father, though I don't like to admit it. Not all of it, mind you. But some. I suppose it was only natural. Children take after their parents, and all that philological mumbo jumbo. Whatever. The point is that... maybe, the point is that, on some level, I wanted to study engineering to see what was so good about it, the reason father wouldn't even brother to mail occasionally while he was out frolicking through space. What made space-traveling so great that he would ignore his own _damn_ family.

I never got the chance to do it. Shortly after my fifth birthday, my father died. Work related incident, they said. Don't know much else. Mother didn't tell me the details, and when I was old enough to look for them I didn't brother to do it, for the same reason that being the son of the black sheep of the Clarke family never bothered me. It really is hard to care about people you don't even know. Mother was really affected about his death... or so she said, the bitch. She went out and said that he had been a great man, that she had loved him deeply and she didn't know what to do, and that she wouldn't never really get over his death. But he wasn't even buried when she started pinning to have her name changed to Dunnor. If you know what I meant.

Not like I can fully blame her for that, not really. She must have been as neglected as myself, but still if they had gotten together, she should have had some sort of self-respect and at least wait after father was buried to whore herself out to the richest available bachelor of the city. There hadn't been any love, though. That much was obvious. At least, on my mother's side of the issue.

She didn't manage to seduce that guy; I don't know the details, but I do know that. Maybe that contributed to what happen next. Probably. Don't think that her managing to rope in that poor bastard could have changed anything, but it probably did contribute to how things went. I grew quietly, without causing trouble, frustrated with the world and most of all with myself. I didn't have many friends, but I did have some. They were good people. Dillon, Amber, Dan, Eva, Rachel, Ben, Edward. I remember their names, even though I have distanced myself with most of them. Also, I graduated from high school with top marks. Around that time, my mother got roped into Unitology. Well, maybe 'roped' wasn't the right word. Maybe that she was simply a stupid and gullible person was actually the truth.

She spend a lot of her savings and father's saving into that damned cult of utter nut-jobs to get a better title. She didn't care about the real world. That people whispered things like 'Marker-head' or 'Rock Worshiper'; that her few friends drew away from her in disgust and pithy; that her only son had to endure the constant pressure from his own classmates, the mockery of all of them; that even when he showed that he belonged her by becoming the top student of the school, they didn't accept it, they just left him alone; that the girl I had a crush on simply laughed when I confessed to her saying that she 'wouldn't never marry the son of a Marker-head'; that the savings she threw away for nothing could have paid an education in the best engineering university, and I had been forced to go in a sub-par one and learn there, even though I did graduate with top marks, like always. She didn't care about anything, and less of all herself.

One day, I found her body hanging from a thin leather rope tied the lamp in the ceiling of the kitchen with a half-empty bottle of vodka and an empty glass in the desk beside her. She made herself one for the road, you might say. I gave her a half-assed burial, and never looked back. It's for the best, I though back then. And it turned up that, indeed, it had been for the best. My life had started to turn up after that. After that, I meet Nicole.

I'm stopping now. My wrists are killing me, and, besides, I'm tired.

I felt like I could sleep for days.

* * *

 _Day 2: Return of The Pointless Diary Entry_

Making inventory. A couple dozen healing rations, some canned food both from the Ishimura and the ship I'm on right now, a Plasma Cutter and several other mining equipment all stocked with ammunition. I'm armed to the teeth, as far as a mere engineer can arm himself. Not like any of it could do much against actual soldiers; it was simply by sheer chance that the mining tools had worked so well in fighting the Necromorphs. Their weakness was dismemberment, and the mining tools were suited for that kind of work. That was all. In an actual fight, they were worth shit.

Like in here.

In this steel junk, everything I ever done and have is worth diddlysquat.

Is almost funny, really.

 _Almost_.

* * *

 _Day 4: Revenge Of The Totally Pointless Diary Entry_

Didn't feel like writing yesterday, all right? Still not really feeling it, but yesterday showed me that spending so many hours alternatively playing Solitary and mindlessly staring at the void of space isn't exactly engaging. So here I am, writing again. For all that's worth. And what's worth is about the size of this document; a drop in the _fucking_ ocean.

Anyway, I ate some food yesterday. It tasted like shit. Not literally, of course. I couldn't have know even if it was. It actually tasted like a piece of paper liberally sprinkled with salt. Still, I swallowed all of it. Felt like vomiting, but I didn't. Thank God for that. I don't know how much time I'm gonna spend in this steel junk, so having to learn to live with the smell of my own vomit on the floor for an indefinite amount of time is not exactly appetizing. No pun intended, ha-ha!

You know. When I was about eight years or so younger, we were quite poor because of my mother spending the money in Unitology titles all that shit. And in the worst kind of poverty, at that. We had some money, far more that enough to give us a decent meal. But we couldn't spend all of it into actually eating properly. There were bills to pay, and the house was kind of necessary in us no dying a miserable, cold death in any of the suburbs. A natural death, or with a knife in the back from some hobo. Whichever came first. Anyway. So, we basically forced ourselves to eat badly even though we could get a decent meal to survive, and I realized that was the worst of it. Of poverty, of hunger. To have food in your sights, but forcing yourself not to eat it to survive.

It reminds me of now, actually.

Ha-ha!

* * *

 _Day 5: Electric Boogaloo_

Ah, don't even know why I am bothering with this. Is almost... well, not, its actually funny. The Great Issac Clarke, genius system engineer of the Concordance Extraction Corporation, sitting all hunched over like Jekyll or Mr. Hyde, whichever of the two fuckers walked like that, on a chair too small for it, writing nearly day after day about pointless shit to distract himself about more important things. Like the people he was worked with for more that five fucking years in the USG Kellion are all dead, and one of them turned up to be a backstabbing, lunatic bitch. That he had to put down most of them, because they had turned into something inhuman that only wanted to kill, something that shouldn't be left alive.

And, most of all, that Nicole was dead and she wasn't ever going to come back.

That she had been the dead right from the beginning, and he had done nothing but a hallucinate his encounters. It's a hilarious tale. A delusional engineer carved his way through a big ass ship full to the brink with monsters with some mining tools, surviving and enduring where far better people that him disappeared meaninglessly, couldn't do anything as one of his last two teammates was brutally killed right in front of his eyes and the other one had never thought highly of this 'being a team' thing to begin with, met two mad mans who were still surviving for some reasons and also watched both of them died. And all of this culminated in a climatic fight with a snarling, alien monstrosity and after escaping a nice, comfortable hallucination of being brutally murdered by the love of his life.

Its so hilarious I felt like puking my own guts out.

* * *

 _Day 6: Yet Another Diary Entry_

I still quite clearly remember the day Nicole and I got together. Its a wonderful memory, but there's no greater misery that reliving happy moments in times of misery. Dante said it a lot of centuries ago, and he was absolutely right. Remembering her, her smile, the way she talked with me, cared about me, how she touched me, her essential kindness. My last, real memory of her is of her blowing her head off so she wouldn't been tore apart by the Necromorphs banging at the hospital bay's doors, so it _hurts_.

And yet, for some crazy reason, I find myself wanting to remember it.

We meet at a bar. I was alone, she was alone and she was beautiful, so I went over there and sat down in front of her to test my luck. We talked for about an hour, and we became friends. Sorta. I was already pinning for her, so I didn't have much feeling of friendship. We keep contact since then. Our schooling keep us busy, but we made time to meet in person at least one day each week. In about the middle of my engineering education, she asked me out. Yeah, she asked me out, not otherwise. I'm still surprised by it, actually. I'm not what you could call a good catch.

I didn't think that at that time, obviously. I just felt happy, and I kissed her as answer. When she kissed back, I felt like I could do anything. To Nicole, it probably wasn't anything special, but it meant the world to me. It still does. It was the happiest day of my life, my far. That's... That's not really saying much, considering my life, but well. It is.

...I don't want to write about this anymore. My wrists don't hurt or anything, is just that I don't want to. How could I?

It _hurts_.

* * *

 _Day 7: who-gives- a-shit_

I have written for the past five minutes an unintelligible, garbled mess, so, now that I don't feel like dying or anything, I might as well do it right this time. I guess it could help me, or something. Though I don't really see how it can. But anyway. About fifteen minutes ago, I waked up and saw a Necromorph leaning over me. Nicole. It didn't have my Plasma Cutter at the ready, so about all I could do was cower in fear and exclaim that she wasn't real.

It didn't do me a lot of good.

It opened its mouth, crudely stitched together into a maniac's grin, and _talked_. That really left no doubt that it was nothing but an hallucination. Still, that didn't help me. It said things, many things. Things like I never loved her, that I only used her to escape my troubled past, that I said yes because I was a worthless sack of shit, everyone knew that, and I that maybe having a pretty, kind girl to walk arm in arm with me could give me some worth. That through all of the years we spend together, I never got to love her even half as much as she did. That, to the end, I was doing nothing to use her to be able to keep on smile.

Worst of all was that some of it did indeed ring true.

And then she tore me apart. The pain was so real I can almost felt it even now, twitching against my skin. The hallucination ended there, but I didn't even notice it at the time. I put my back against the wall, and became a sobbing wreck for about ten minutes. Then I stood up, sat down in front of the fucking computer, and here I am. Still crying, but at least my breathing is under control and my heart is beating normally. Is not something great, but hey. Even small victories are victories.

* * *

 _Day 8: Attack Of The Pointless Diary Entry_

I spend the day staring at space, hoping I could some ship in the distance, trying not too think too hard about more uncomfortable things. I didn't see any ship, and I did ended up thinking about those uncomfortable things. Now I kind of avoiding going to sleep by writing this, since I have some great nightmare fuel I really don't want to try. My head has already begun to go up and down, and is getting hard to keep my eyes open even under the harsh glare of the monitor's light.

Story of my life.

* * *

 _Day 9_

I didn't ate anything since the first day. I felt like I could eat a whole elephant right now, no hyperbole, so I ate some food. It was terrible self indulgent, and wholly unnecessary. Humans could survive for about a month without eating nothing, and I have been here only eight days. Still, I stuffed my stomach with all sorts of horrible tasting food. I felt kind of guilty, but the sensation of having a full stomach made up for it.

* * *

 _Day 10_

Still not seeing an end to this shit; news at eleven.

Ha-ha!

* * *

 _Day 11_

I am getting better at Solitary. No surprise there, though. Its about the only thing I have to keep me occupied, aside from writing this pointless shit, and if I didn't get any better after ten days and about six more hours of playing it, that would have been really pathetic. It still doesn't distract me as much as I would want, but it passes the time the time better that writing over and over about pointless, self deprecating shit.

At least, its a start.

* * *

 _Day 20: The Empire Strikes Back_

I have erased the previous nine entries. This is about pointless shit, but, really, even then there has to been some kind of limit.

* * *

 _Day 30_

Didn't really felt like writing. Didn't feel like doing much of anything, really. I have been sleeping continuously, and when I couldn't I just lied down on the ground and stared at the ceiling, thinking about my situation, what happened back in the Ishimura, Nicole, about what I could have done to make things better and, most of all, of what's going to happen to me now. I didn't get no answers. No surprise there, there aren't any answers for that shit to begin with.

I meant, first of all, my situation. I am floating on this ship through space, blindly hoping somebody will see me and pick me up before I end up dying on hunger or I dunno, something else. Its either I die or I don't, and I won't get my answer until I actually happens. The odds are in favor of me dying a horrible, miserable dead, though. That much is obvious.

What happened back in the Ishumura was out of my control, and by the time we went there nearly everybody was dead, so I couldn't have fixed shit. Didn't have no meaning, either. Just a giant space rock turning everyone into monsters hell bend on killing.

Nicole... I could have told her not to go, and she still be here, yea, that much is true. But I didn't have no reason to tell her not to go back them. And if I told her to not go, to throw away her dream job, I'm sure as hell she wouldn't have remained with me, anyway. So, yeah. Fucked if you do, fucked if you don't. Story of my life.

I wonder if its even worth to...

Never mind.

* * *

 _Day 33_

I have started having hallucinations again. Things like voices coming from nowhere, the chair moving by himself, the monitor exploding, the image of the writing program being overwrite by Nicole's dead face. I saw Nicole a couple of times too, in a bloodied uniform. She didn't hurt me. Oh, no. I almost wished she had, because she talked. A lot. And every last word of it stung. Worse of all was that covering my ears didn't matter. That sound was all coming from my head, so I heard it all perfectly even when I did.

Joy.

* * *

 _Day 45_

A ship passed me over. Like, really over me. I was a miracle I saw it to begin with. Wish I didn't. I tried to send a distress message, but the communications didn't work. They didn't see me, either. I sat staring in front of me, incredulous, my reflection in the glass one of a maniac. While I was it, Nicole appeared by my side in that bloody uniform.

"What did you think could happen, Issac?" she whispered. "You are as good as dead already, admit it. You know how things are going. The USG Valor didn't come to help you, but to wipe the survivors off so the information about what really happened wouldn't spread. It's over, Issac. Its over."

I didn't care. I laughed. I laughed almost shrilly, and I kept on laughing. Didn't even notice when Nicole disappeared. And some point, I started crying. I still am. Its hard to write while crying, but well, whatever. The program automatically corrects everything I write, and, besides, this is only for me so its not like it matters if it turned up it had more grammatical mistakes that holes has a Swiss cheese.

...That was a really bad metaphor.

* * *

 _Day 55_

I still have a lot of food, but I'm worrying anyway. I don't think I can last more that a year like this, even if I force myself to eat only enough to not fall over and die. It seems like a needless worry, that even so I'm not going to be even a year like this, but a month and half has already passed like this and, staring at the empty void beyond the glass, is kind of hard to think things can get better.

* * *

 _Day 66_

Things didn't get better. Didn't even see another ship that would inevitably pass me by. I still have a lot of food, and, to be fair, this is only the third month. Nobody said this would be easy. Also, I have lost weight, a lot of weight. When I look at my reflection in the glass, I only see flabby skin and bones. Today alone I felt like could pass out twice. I managed to kept myself together those times, yeah, but still its far for a good sign.

I need to start eating more. That will reduce my food supply, which would make far bigger problems down the line, but it doesn't matter.

I can't care about the bigger problems if I'm dead, so I'm gonna eat anyway.

* * *

 _Day 72... Probably._

I'm tired of this. I was already tired since this shit began, but I can't stand any of it anymore. If there was silence, it at least could be bearable, but the hallucinations don't leave me a moment of rest. I know. I know what those voices coming from nowhere are. The voices of Hammond, and Nicole and all the people I couldn't save. The teammates that were slaughtered beyond those glass windows. The roars, the terrified screams, the twisted necks, that sickening crunch, the flowing blood. The scene out of a nightmare unfolding between flashes of the orange, emergency light. I don't think I can ever forget it.

And most of all, I can't forget that, in the end, I chose what was convenient. I ran like hell because I was terrified of the pain, of dying, of never seeing Nicole again. I'm tired of hearing them curse me, condemn me. I'm tired of suffering through the tricks my broken mind conjures, of crying and feeling like screaming when nobody can heard me and there's no longer anybody that would care, anyway. This.. this needs to end.

I pick up the Plasma Cutter, feeling its weight. Now I'm thinking about that man, the first corpse from the Ishimura that I saw. The man hunched over against a wall, that wrote in his own blood with the last of his streght 'Cut off their limbs'. If he hadn't done that, I would probably have died. I wonder how did he felt back then, how he resisted the hopelessness of his situation crashing down on him and still thought about others in his last moments. I don't know. I don't understand how could a person be like that; I'm selfish, so I can't. But it doesn't matter now.

I make my helmet unfold. One shot; that all it takes to end a life. My life was already over the moment we crashed inside the Ishimura, but this will mark the end point of it. I suck in a breath. It's nothing. My aim is really good, so there's no chances of making a mistake and dying a painful, slow death. One shot, one instant. That's all it takes. I bring the Plasma Cutter against my forehead with one hand. I suppose I should say something now, in case somebody finds this, what's likely the last truth about what happened in the USG Ishimura, but I don't have one thing to ask. It's more like a prayer.

Please, don't let our struggles, our suffering, be for nothing.

I'm going now.


End file.
